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bahookie
Added to my commonplace book today:
BAHOOKIE
n. Scottish informal, “a person’s buttocks”
also, “an ass“
Example usage: “try that again I’ll be kicking your fury, brown bahookie” –McSquizzy’s Army Scene, in “Open Season”
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The Punchline
I do not really like hockey. I do not really like podcasts. (I also really do not like a couple of the words used in this episode.) But FOR REAL IF YOU LIKE SPORTS AND STORIES AT ALL YOU SHOULD REALLY LISTEN TO THIS!
The Punchline
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Fellowship: A Mess Worth Making
Our church has another seminar scheduled a few Sundays from now. This will be our fifth seminar, the first two were about parenting and the last two were about marriage. We asked for feedback and ideas after last year’s seminar and one of the suggestions was to talk about fellowship. Fellowship is an easily misunderstood and often misused word. For many folks it means food, probably in a basement with a tiled floor (or industrial carpet) with all sorts of casseroles and bitter coffee.
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Open Communion, Closed Membership
We love celebrating weekly communion at our church, and it is having multiple desired effects. It proclaims the Lord’s death (1 Corinthians 11:26). It unites the body as we participate in the blood and body of Christ (1 Corinthians 10:16). It encourages us to keep short accounts (1 Corinthians 11:28). And it makes people ask questions, including our kids, who wonder when they will get to share in communion.
This is a feature, it doesn’t have to be a frustration.
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Our Father Who Judges
When we come to our time of confession as part of our worship we come to confess our sins to our Father. God is holy, God is righteous, God is just, God is the judge of the world. But to all who believe in His name, “he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13).
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On Carrying My Own (Digital) Man-purse
I am not a perfect minimalist, but I am drawn to it in certain contexts like iPad writers are to Starbucks. In my time as a more severe dualist I thought it very sanctimonious to carry the least amount of things with me as possible. My wife can not only bear witness, she has often had to bear my load.
When we would travel together, I would let her bring a bar of soap, and I would borrow.
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NoDiscontentDecember Postmortem
It’s been a couple weeks since the official end of our family’s finishing hashtag of 2018. I posted about it a few times, and here is an autopsy report.
The focus, agreed upon by every member of the family, was fitting and helpful. December was "richly scheduled," as Anese Cavenaugh likes to say, and it was good to take fussiness off the table as an acceptable response. That's not to say no one was ever fussy, but it was nice to have the zero tolerance policy clearly in place.
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The Telos of Jealousy
The Headmaster at our school recently wrote about Raising…and Being the Cool Kids. Here are a couple key paragraphs:
All of Paul’s ministry had a telos of jealousy. He was working hard (as a Jew!) to make Jews jealous of the glorious blessings the Gentiles were enjoying….and there were plenty of blessings to go around! All the Jews needed to do was repent and embrace their Savior, and they would share those glorious riches with their Gentile brothers.
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Spiritual Gifts: What They Are and Why They Matter
3 of 5 stars to Spiritual Gifts: What They Are and Why They Matter by Thomas R. Schreiner
Good. Brief. Mostly Cessationist. I’d gladly recommend it without completing agreeing with it.
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Breaking the Vicious Cycle
3 of 5 stars to by Breaking the Vicious Cycle: Intestinal Health Through Diet by Elaine Gottschall
I LOVE ALL THE CARBS IN THE WHOLE WORLD
I also have had (or have) some GERD and general gut problems, though not as extreme as the cases of Crohn’s and Celiac Disease that Gottschall addresses.
So…that makes the Specific Carbohydrate Diet interesting, and/or frightening (#cauliflowerpizzaisnotrealpizza). Ha. I’m very glad I finally read the book, but I’m not sure if or when I’ll be implementing the diet.
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All a Pitter-pattering
Is love more science or more story? Is love an historical fact or a philosophical idea? Is love a Platonic ideal, an abstract quality existing Up There, or is love an Aristotelian reality, expressed Down Here in hands and lips and bodies? Where do you learn about love best? Reading the dictionary? Reading the Bible? Hearing a story? Getting a timely hug from your dad?
As much as I love a good dictionary, dictionaries don’t inspire.
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Perpetual Shortfall
There are a couple sure-fire ways to get almost any Christian to feel guilty. One way is to ask a believer about his prayer life. A recurring response is that, “It could be better.” Well of course it could. You don’t really need to sleep, right? Jesus spent whole nights in prayer…what is your excuse?
That’s an easy one, but the one exhortation to rule them all is not about Bible reading or prayer, it’s not about church attendance, it’s not about how many dates you’ve taken your wife on in the last year, it’s not if you’ve ever spoken to your kids in impatience or anger.
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There are some quality pics of Abraham Kuyper on the interwebs. This one is hard to find online, and I’m sharing it as my new favorite thing:
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Deadness Also Smells Like Death
As is usually the case, there are ranges on a spectrum when it comes to the question of whether believers should speak and live in such a way that unbelievers would be attracted to the gospel of Christ.
There is one side—usually driven by the Bible and theology, even Reformed, Calvinistic doctrines such as the depravity of man and the need for irresistible grace—of those who argue that Christians and the gospel cannot be attractive to sinners and therefore any attempt to make ourselves winsome is naive at best and probably actually dangerous, you know, slippery slope and all.
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Losing as a weapon
First, this ought to be a great encouragement to the church:
“Losing does not disturb us; it does not unsettle our faith. This is something the Church generally does really well. Speaking frankly, we frequently lose successfully far more often than we succeed successfully. Losing is our secret weapon” (Same Sex Mirage, pp. 258-259). Second, this was written by a postmillennialist, but doesn’t it do a much better job of explaining how a dispensational premillennialist can be optimistic about the progress of the gospel and the “success” of the church while still thinking the world is going to hell?
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Communion That Smells
As we spread “the fragrance of the knowledge of [Christ] everywhere,” God says that we are an aroma “among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance of life to life” (2 Corinthians 2:14-16). Spreading the fragrance happens by preaching (see verse 17), it happens by practice, and it happens when we partake at the Lord’s Table.
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Calvinist Knees
How does a Calvinist confess his sins? That’s not the start of a joke.
We are a Calvinistic church, meaning that we believe that God is God, God rules over all, and that includes His sovereignty in the salvation of men. We believe that He elects spiritually dead men to be brought to Him as worshippers for eternity. He has their names already written in a book. They are a love gift from the Father to the Son as a Bride.
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He Is Neither Here Nor There
I’m late to linking but the point remains piquant: the principles underneath today’s public education are rotten and Christians need to get off the floor.
Whoever the audience is for this blog, I imagine that it’s mostly my friends. If you are one of my friends, I also figure you read Blog and Mablog, and you almost certainly enjoyed #NoQuarterNovember. Wilson’s first post was, Burn All the Schools, and I’m still crying (on the inside) with laughter over this analogy:
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Gaining Weight
I pray that we all gain weight this year.
In a day and age like ours, in a country like ours, the exceptions are the few who need to put on more pounds of body weight. When we think about our daily bread we’re thinking about which kind of carbs we crave, not the minimum portion we need to survive. The abundance of food is a blessing, and of course blessings can be abused, and belt sizes bulge.